Crews Begin Cleaning Up 147K Gallons of Keystone Oil

Trucks and workers have started cleaning up the Keystone oil pipeline spill in rural North Dakota, with the cause of the break and the timeline of the effort still unclear. The pipeline ruptured Tuesday morning in the southeastern part of the state and was shut down within two minutes by an employee who heard a mechanical bang, the AP reports. An aerial photo released Wednesday shows a black, pondlike pool of oil suspended in a partially snowy field that's traversed by tire tracks. A farmer said he could smell the scent of crude oil, carried by the wind. The situation:

• The volume: South Bow, a liquid pipelines business that manages the pipeline, estimated the spill at 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons. Keystone's entire system remains shut down. The spill is not a minor one, said Paul Blackburn of Bold Alliance, an environmental and landowners group that fought the pipeline's extension, called Keystone XL. The estimated volume is equal to 16 tanker trucks of oil, he said. And that estimate could increase over time.
• The cleanup: The spill is contained to an agricultural field. South Bow said it has multiple on-site vacuum trucks beginning to recover the oil. Continuous air quality monitoring is underway. The pipeline's affected segment is isolated, and the company said it's evaluating plans for a return to service.

• The cause: Unknown. The company said Wednesday it's investigating and trying to determine how long repairs will take. A spokesperson said the pipeline "was operating within its design and regulatory approval requirements at the time of the incident."
• Possibilities: Generally, underground oil pipelines can have a number of stressors, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti of the University of Houston. Those include corrosive elements from the liquid within the pipeline, changing temperatures, moving soil, movement from trains or construction equipment on the surface and stress to bends, turns and joints in the pipeline. The 2,700-mile pipeline originates in Alberta, Canada, and carries heavy tar sands crude oil south across the Dakotas and Nebraska before splitting to carry oil both to refineries in Illinois and south to Oklahoma and Texas.
• The backdrop: Blackburn said the bigger picture is what he called the Keystone Pipeline's history of spills at a higher rate than other pipelines. He compared Keystone to the Dakota Access oil pipeline since the latter came online in June 2017. In that period, Keystone's system has spilled nearly 1.2 million gallons of oil, while Dakota Access spilled 1,282 gallons, Blackburn said.

(More oil spill stories.)